Changing the narrative of surviving to thriving: A longitudinal study of student stress, engineering culture, and retention in engineering programs

Introduction: Student well-being is a critical concern for higher education. National surveys identify increasing prevalence and severity of mental health challenges for undergraduate students, in parallel with decreases in measures of positive mental health and flourishing. A majority of students report high stress levels, and a recent study identified stress as a top reason for students leaving their undergraduate programs. In engineering programs, studies of undergraduate students’ norms and expectations identify narratives of required high stress for success in engineering and glorification of lack of self-care. In order to best support student well-being, it will be critical to understand how students experience stress, including identifying stressors that trigger high stress, and how stress impacts their decisions to remain in their program. In addition, understanding how perceived norms and expectations related to stress influence student decision-making will support development of proactive interventions. Many studies of student mental health and stress are limited in that they are (1) not longitudinal at the individual level, (2) do not measure engineering-specific stressors, and (3) do not consider engineering culture. This presentation will describe the development of new survey measures of engineering stress culture and stressors for undergraduate engineering students that were combined in a longitudinal study with measures of stress and intention to remain in engineering programs.

Materials and

Methods: A survey was distributed to incoming engineering undergraduate students twice per semester for two years (eight timepoints total). The survey included the engineering stress culture scale (10 items), the undergraduate stress questionnaire in engineering (USQ-E) (8 subscales, 48 items), the DASS-21 stress subscale (7 items), and the intention to remain subscale adapted to engineering (6 items). In total, each survey included 71 total quantitative items. Additionally, each survey distribution included 3-5 open-ended response questions. Finally, participants submitted demographics, including but not limited to gender identity, first-generation student status, among other identities. A total of 2,883 responses were collected over two years, representing 587 participants. Descriptive statistics and dynamics of variables over time were used to understand the relationships among variables and their dynamics over time. Logistic regression models were built to understand roles of culture, stress, and stressors in student intention to remain in their engineering program. Linear regression models analyze the predictive power of variables and how predictive power changes over the course of the first two years of the engineering program.

Results, Conclusions, and Discussions: At the population level, student stress follows a periodic pattern, with higher stress reported at the end of the semester, with a slight overall increase of stress over the two years of the study. Over time, endorsement of engineering stress culture increases slightly, with the average participant slightly agreeing with the existence of a culture. The standard deviation of responses decreases in each timepoint, suggesting that student endorsements of the culture became more similar over time, an acculturation process. Preliminary results suggest that a subset of engineering stressors are the best predictors of intention to remain in engineering programs, and may be mediated by endorsements of engineering stress culture. Several engineering stressors can predict students’ overall stress levels, and the strength and significance of these stressors on stress levels vary between timepoints, but engineering stress culture is consistently among the strongest predictors.

Results from this study indicate that experience of specific stressors and resulting stress is dynamic, which suggests that single-timepoint studies of stress and culture may provide incomplete pictures of student experiences. This work, combined with previous qualitative work, suggests that seasonality of stress and stressors (e.g., exams, winter months) will have implications for research studies as well as interventions designed to support students. Over half of participants trended towards agreeing with the existence of a high stress culture, suggesting that many students believe that high stress experience and promoting work over self-care are expected for engineering students.

Understanding the dynamics of student stressors and experiences of stress will be important in developing proactive interventions. Further, understanding the role of stress culture in engineering will be important in developing better supports for students and ultimately changing the narrative of surviving in engineering programs to one of thriving where positive well-being is celebrated in engineering.

Acknowledgements (Optional): This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1943541. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The authors thank the study participants for sharing about their experiences. The authors thank project advisory board members Jennifer Cromley, Allison Godwin, and Nicola Sochacka for feedback on research design and analysis.